Every day, Iberdrola’s remote customer support channels provide service to over 30,000 customers from the Spanish market. That’s equivalent to almost one million interactions every month! Thousands of customers that need our energy to run their businesses or simplify their daily lives at home and who ask us for help with various proceedings, information about special offers, exceptions, bills, etc.
We are living in complicated times, with consumers keener than ever to maximise the value they obtain from their customer support relations. Their experience with companies defines their behaviour and their decisions for the present and future.
In a sector where the product that we market is exactly the same regardless of which company is marketing it, service and customer support are the only elements that can set us apart, and which have a clear impact on the trust our customers place in us.
That is why the recognition received from the Spanish Association of Experts in Customer Relations (AEERC), which awarded Iberdrola the CRC Gold Prize 2013 for the Best Customer Relations Center within the Energy and Utilities Sector in Spain on 8 October, is particularly important.
The CRC Gold Prizes acknowledge the work of companies in Spain in guiding and serving their customers via the various contact channels. These awards, which are now in their 16th edition, are a benchmark in the industry and reinforce Iberdrola’s strategy and commitment to giving our customers an exceptional level of service.
In each of the 10 million + interactions we manage on an annual basis (9,500,000 calls, 600,000 e-mails and over 18,000 tweets on Twitter), we aim for two main goals: to deal with the customer’s request in the same contact and ensure high quality support, as the means of achieving satisfied customers.
To make this possible, we now have seven telephone platforms serving our customers in Spain and Portugal (Barcelona, Güeñes, Madrid, Valencia, Lisbon and two centres in Santiago de Chile), some 1,400 telephone operators and the backing of our entire retail team.
This prize acknowledges the effort made by so many people every day, both in Iberdrola and in our main service providers (Unísono, Konecta and IZO) and it follows various other awards received directly or in collaboration with our suppliers in the last five years.
More important than the prizes is the fact that we can see our ongoing improvement via our quality indicators on a daily basis. The latest results of the customer satisfaction surveys show that satisfaction is rising and on an upward trend. We currently answer 85% of calls in less than 30 seconds, with an average waiting time of just 23 seconds. The quality audits performed by an external company every day gave us a score of 8.3 points in the last quarter. This is confirmed by our customers’ degree of satisfaction, with over 80% claiming that we dealt with their requests in a single call.
This improvement is a consequence of the company’s focus on the customer, which starts with listening and monitoring our interactions with them on an ongoing basis. Our quality control tools help us to identify situations in need of improvement and we implement the necessary measures to deal with any such situations in collaboration with our suppliers.
It is the energy of all the people that make up this chain that enables us to go on improving every day and which has allowed us to achieve this level of success. We are aware that there is still much to be improved and we will continue to strive to offer better support to our customers and make our service our company’s real energy.
